Are Vegans cruel?

[Jon]

I've got a slightly different angle on this topic to most people (surprise surprise)! So, are Vegans cruel? No, not due to them depriving us of all that lovely juicy meat we like to eat, which for me is one of life's big pleasures. Instead, it is due to the ethics of Vegans depriving one of life.

Now on first glance, this seems to be the complete opposite of their position. They are pro-life and so do not want the killing of animals to satisfy our palate. Yet here is my beef with this...

By trying to save lives you are depriving lives. Look at how many animals have a life because we like meat. How many cows would not be alive if the Vegans became a political force and ousted the usual parties? The ethics of this are interesting. One may argue that you are not killing anything by not conceiving in the first place and so it is not cruel. But ask any of those cows if they would rather not be born. Why not aggregate the votes of those affected? I doubt the cows would vote against having their own life being created.

[I am leaving out animal cruelty due to poor conditions, so for now, my argument above relates to free range chickens, roaming pigs and grass fed cows.]

It will become a mute point soon as lab grown meat will take over, but even those slabs of tissue may have feelings too, what with their nerves and so on!

So, why do we not consider the unborn life as important as the taken life? At the end of the day, it is pretty similar. Both get deprived of a life.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

My take is that Vegans can eat what they want in a technological society because we can make supplements for the kinds of things vegetables don't give us. We can have our blood chemistry monitored. We can genetically modify certain food sources to be more nutritious or less harmful. But that leaves us the question of whether we want those other animals to live in vain, in which case they are competitors for grain and certain other food sources. So do we slaughter our competitors anyway? Does the Vegan movement, by removing the value of those animals, more greatly expose them to "survival of the fittest" effects that will lead to their extinction?